Experiencing Animal Vision Through Virtual Reality

Marshmallow Laser Feast is a London-based design studio researching and exploring the boundaries between virtual and real-world experiences. Eyes of the Animal is an interactive project that invites the public to an uncommon virtual reality setting conceived especially for experiences in actual forests, giving the opportunity to see the world as an insect would.

The project was presented at the Abandon Normal Devices Festival in Grizedale Forest, Britain, last month. Guests were encouraged to put on Oculus Rift virtual reality helmets and backpacks, to have a 360-degree sense of the environment around them, as experienced by frogs, dragonflies and other territorial species. This experience is even more captivating thanks to sounds and vibrations, coming from Subpac, a wearable subwoofer. Everything is possible as a result of a combination of LiDAR, CT scanning and aerial 360-degree drone recording.

Barney Steel, Marshmallow Laser Feast’s co-founder, says that the ambition was to weight VR in such a way to provoke the public’s viewpoints, as he explains: “We’ve always had a hunger for hacking people’s senses by combining art and technology. Using VR (Vitual Reality) to immerse someone in the sights and sounds of animals creates empathy by simulating the way that others sense the world. This type of first person perspective experience is-in my opinion-VR at its best”.

The experiment has been presented in Britain for now, but the hope of the people at MLF is to share it with the entire world.